Player-created towns support is now live in Build S7.0/378! Town support allows you to do cooperative building projects with friends, whether that is creating an actual town, or working on any other shared construction project.

I am planning to do a video blog about the towns system (hopefully tomorrow), but in the meanwhile, here's how it works:

How is each region now categorized?

Each region (about a screen's worth of tiles) can now be categorized as one of these three areas:

Capital City - No PvP. You can build in any unclaimed area and can't mess with other player's creations.

Player City - Limited PvP (only citizens can cause damage). Any citizen can modify any block, but non-citizens can do nothing.

Wilderness - Full PvP. For now, blocks in wilderness are safe from griefing, but later on this will likely change. Monsters spawn.

How do I create a town?

To create a town, buy a Town Stone from the shop and place it down. It must be a good distance away from any other towns.

Then to name your town, type /townname <town name here>

How do I join a town?

Ask the mayor of that town to stand in the town, and then they should type /townadd <your user name>

Wah! It takes forever to walk to my town!

If you're a citizen of a town, you can type /towntele <town name here> and be instantly teleported just south of the town stone.

My town needs more space

As the mayor, type /townexpand while standing in your town. Expansion is expensive though!'

Town Citizen vs Town Official

A town citizen can place blocks in your town anywhere, but only pick up their own blocks. A town official has permission to take ANY blocks from your town. Be careful who you make officials!

Command List

These commands can be typed into the chat window. For many of these, you need to be standing in the town while you execute the command.

/townexpand - (Mayor Only) Expand the size of your town (costs plat)

/townname <town name> - (Mayor Only) Names your own

/townadd <player name> - (Mayor Only) Adds a citizen

/towndel <player name> - (Mayor Only) Removes a citizen

/towninfo - Gets information about the town you are in

/towntele <town name> - (Citizen only) Teleport to town stone

/townoff <player name> - (Mayor Only) Toggle town official status of a citizen

/townpvp - (Mayor or Official Only) Toggle Player vs Player status of the town

Eventually this will all be accessible via the UI, and chat window commands won't be required. Additionally, I'll be adding more commands/abilities once Town vs Town warfare is implemented.

It would be a good idea to give each town a NPC, so that if the mayor wants to know how to do something in his town, he can ask the NPC. This would work when you are the only mayor online and have no idea how to do something.

Oh, will buildings in the wilderness be vulnurable for pickup by any stranger in the future? I don’t like the idea (except in cases of blocks placed by players inactive for about 90 days or something, abandoned buildings)

I like to play as an outlaw living away from urban areas in a PvP area… No town needed (although I have some connections with towns by road). But now I read that my mansion might become endangered in an unmanageable in the future…
Now if my Wilderness area becomes town area, I can live with the fact town officials are able to claim my property in some way (there must be some thrill in a game), but just having my mansion and all stuff around confiscated by anyone, just because it’s in the wilderness isn’t nice.

And as I can’t be online whole days, it’s impossible to try and defend my mansion either.

It would be nice to reconsider this. I think it would be too easy to just be possible to pick up any block in the wilderness area. It should be far more difficult. (for instance because a town claims the area, like I described above)

If a town claims the area it creates a nice kind of gameplay as an outlaw to try and come to an agreement with the town mayor and his entourage. (One might wish that I need to join the town and follow the community habits, another mayor might have no mercy, resulting in a fight between the town people and the outlaw (& friends), etc. etc., I’m mainly thinking about interesting gameplay, and just being possible to go in the wilderness and pick up the blocks you can use (or trade), isn’t really interesting… (and short-lived, the day this becomes possible, those present in the game at that moment will for sure ngo around and take what they can take before anyone else takes it…)

As far as I know, this post hasn’t been changed since it was made, January 2012. So, as it hasn’t happened yet, it’s highly unlikely it’s going to happen any time soon, if ever.
At present, only moderators can pick up blocks in the wilderness, but only if the owner hasn’t been on for 30 days or more, and complete structures shouldn’t be removed. Additionally, the blocks are sent back to the owner’s inventory, so there’s no personal gain from removing stuff.

Since I joined the game, (not for the first time) I created a new account. Then when the game started, I talked to an NPC and it spoke weird pig – latin like languages. (Like when knights speak back in the days…) So I went to menu > settings > languages and it was on English > Google translate > (Japanese things) How to fix?